Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this #1 New York Times bestseller chronicles a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp … fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.
In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.
As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Harlem Shuffle!
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Great book. It was hard to put down. I highly recommend reading it@
I loved this book and learned a lot of history from reading it.
An introduction to a part of our history not generally known.
Gorgeously written book. But too painful for me to finish.
Great read, so enlightening as to the struggle of Black Americans in the South & in a story form.
Terrible! Disjointed writing, full of misinformation and fantasy, gore, and exaggeration.
Not realistic
A lot of hype for only a “meh” book. Her decisions didn’t make sense during her journey and the ending was pretty unimpressive.
A part of American history that every American should read.
Once you get back the imaginary railroad this is a great look at what African Americans had to put up with – with several scenarios as you move through the states.
It’s hard to ‘enjoy’ a novel like this – it’s brutal, violent, and depicts an alternative pre-Civil War America that seems just as horrifically real as what actually existed. I liked the author’s way of unfolding the story through various characters and flashback chapters. I was reading this while simultaneously reading “These Truths” (a new, one-volume history of the U.S.), and it was an interesting exercise to read about the historical moments leading up to the Civil War juxtaposed with Mr. Whitehead’s alternative. Cora, the main character, becomes alive as your read her story and you experience her journey’s many ups and downs as if you were there with her. Mr. Whitehead has written a novel that is definitely provocative and deeply moving; he holds a mirror up to our nation and forces readers to confront the racism and bigotry (and selflessness and empathy) that permeate our country’s history.
Favorite book
This was a difficult book to read. It was so raw and had such an impact on me. It was so well written and so gripping. The characters were real and sympathetic. I just had such a hard time believing that people could be so inhuman. But some were and are. And realizing that this was based on oral histories made it all the more meaningful.
Harrowing!
Very insightful
This is the story of a slave named Cora. Cora is a young woman working on a cotton plantation in the south. Her life is hard and her master is brutal. One night, a fellow slave comes to her, and asks her to escape with him on the Underground Railroad. She agrees. They get as far as South Carolina where she spends 10 months before she is discovered and turned in. On her return to the south, a group of freed slaves come upon her captors and free her. She goes to Indiana to a farm to work as a freed slave. Unfortunately, this farm is burned and she is on the run again – looking for a place where she can finally be free of hatred.
This book was…..fine. I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. There were many many parts that I enjoyed. It is gut wrenching what the slaves had to endure. Just sickening. But the book overall was a mass of confusion. I had a hard time following it. There were many sections of the book that had minor characters that didn’t add to the story – just added more confusion. And I know this is historical fiction, but an Underground Railroad that was actually a railroad? With a train? Come on. It takes away, in my opinion, what the underground railroad really was and how it worked. People certainly didn’t move quickly to escape slavery, and this author made it out to be a fast moving train that got people out quickly.
I have a hard time recommending it, and a hard time not. I think there is enough information about slavery that, especially in today’s climate, would be important to shed light on. If you can look past the utterly fictional parts of this book, then you might enjoy it.
I do not understand the hype about this book. Thoroughly underwhelming.
Beautiful writing and much to discuss in my book club.
Tells a very unfortunate tale.
I don’t get what everyone raved about, I did not care for this book and thought it made light of the real underground railroad and all the heartache that went along with it.